Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix. That the replacement process entails swapping (and potentially upgrading, as I did in this exact situation with my FW16) just the motherboard instead of the entire laptop is a strict improvement.

That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.